ISBN 9780600341581

ISBN-10

0600341585

Binding

Paperback

Number of Pages

290 Pages

Language

(English)

Subject

Body & health

This beautiful book is an essential companion for today's lovers. Utterly frank in its attitude to sex and without obscurities of expression or context, Vatsyayana's work is shown to be as enriching and as delightful as it appeared to the courtiers of almost two thousands years ago. Kama Sutra is the world's classic study of the arts of love, written in about the third century AD by the mysterious sage Vatsyayana. He analyses, with the detached wisdom of old age, the possibilities of lovemaking from the first approaches to the consummation, from the sexual positions to the arrangement of furniture and the role of a go-between. His dry wit, charm and vivid language combine to give the book a relevance for beyond the perfumed world of ancient India that it describes, and create of it a humane masterpiece that contains no hint of obscenity. Kama Sutra has only been known in the English language in a nineteenth-century translation by Sir Richard Burton. The present work is an entirely new translation, made for a modern public; a public which, with Vatsyayana, understands far more clearly than did Burton's contemporaries the importance of physical pleasure to spiritual welfare. To enable the reader to appreciate the mood of ancient Indian society - the essential context without which the work's more intimate details have little meaning-the text has been illustrated throughout by Indian miniatures. Some show scenes of village or palace life, others are explicitly erotic. This refreshingly readable translation brings to life a book which is as relevant today as it was when it first appeared.